Pirate Electrician Supplied Power To 1,500 Homes 373
fridaynightsmoke writes "A former electrical engineer for utility EDF has been prosecuted for illegally supplying power to some 1,500 homes in north London. Derek Brown, 45, was arrested in 2008 after being seen tampering with the electric grid in a manhole. He specialized in connecting separate supplies to houses that were split into apartments. One landlord involved, Haresh Parmar, was jailed for 9 months for stealing £30,000 worth of electricity for 22 of his apartments. Brown's assets will be seized and he has been sentenced to 8 months suspended, and 150 hours community service."
Oh my-- (Score:4, Funny)
What a shocking development
Re: (Score:2)
I once stole cable from a neighbor.
1500 homes? That's pretty ambitious. This guy must have nuts of steel, or a rock for a brain.
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And yet it enabled him to supply more power than the average renewable power government project. I say we need more nuts and rocks !
Re:Logical disjunction? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd like to point out that this sort of thing is very common in third world countries. When it happens, it drives up prices for actual paying customers by making it exponentially more difficult for utilities to provide service and maintain infrastructure due to the uncompensated stress put on their systems. As the increased taxes and regulations of the modern socialist nanny state crushes entrepreneurship and throws ever larger numbers of people out of work and onto welfare, expect to see more of this as a harbinger of things to come.
Remember, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
Libertarian fantasy wank. (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah I hate how high taxes and over regulation created those third world countries... oh wait they are almost universally libertarian fantasies in which even local policing is "outsourced" to "entrepreneurs".
This sort of Libertarian fantasy wank gets modded insightful?
P.S. The freedom crushing is being done at the behest of under-regulated corporate behemoths that can buy laws. Which is the end result of Libertarian fantasy wank.
Re:Libertarian fantasy wank. (Score:4, Insightful)
Nothing you just said there made any sense. The guy wasn't connecting taxes and regulation with third world countries, he was just remarking that in developing countries many people steal electricity, cable TV, and so forth. And it's true.
P.S. There's nothing libertarian about "buying laws". In a libertarian society, those with wealth wouldn't have the same opportunity to use it to buy coercive legislation over others that they do in the real world. A strong state tends to amplify the influence of the wealthy, not mitigate it.
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If there's no significant accumulation of power in the government to begin with, all the money in the world will do you no good here. You can't buy that which doesn't exist.
Let me explain how it actually works: (Score:4, Insightful)
Trickle-down: When an already wealthy entity receives money, it becomes more and more conservative with it. It invests it outside the core business (diversification) or it squirrels it away (hoarding), sometimes in the form of non-cash (art, land, etc.) What it doesn't do is turn around and shower that money on the workers, or the consumers, of the products it is currently selling. This trickle down idea is a myth, a myth started and maintained by those whose only goal is to collect as much of everyone else's money as possible.
Credit: The function of credit is to expand the gap between the wealthy and the poor, by transferring money from the poor to the wealthy. Here's how it works. At some interest rate, $100 is made available to the poor by the wealthy. The poor pays back $110. That $100 then is actually worth $90 to the poor, but $110 to the wealthy. At the end of the transaction, the wealthy have more money. The poor, however, have less, although they have $100 worth of goods, with a probable resale value of far less, should they try and exchange them for cash. It is worth noting that in general, they goods they purchase they also buy from the wealthy. The result of the credit process is a continuous transfer of money from the poor to the rich - never the other way, unless the debt repayment is defaulted, and even then, statistically speaking, this doesn't slow the process down much.
This is why the libertarian idea of corporate freedom is bunk. Corporations are not people; if we compare them honestly to persons, they're a lot more like psychopaths. No society that lets them run free can remain healthy; the US is one recent example; when unregulated, jobs are sent overseas, healthcare is not provided, products are not made to last, warranty and service are only given under profound duress, copy protection, software differentiation, IP hoarding and other anti-consumer practices become not just common, but the standard for behavior.
The libertarian outlook has major value in that area where it recognizes the liberties and freedoms of people, and says that government should have no authority there. When those freedoms are extended to corporations, the libertarian ideal turns immediately into a nightmare, one not all that unlike the one we're currently experiencing. Corporations are not people. They completely lack empathy, sympathy, compassion, courtesy, loyalty, and honor. They are, quite literally, psychopaths. Given the strengths of a legal person, they will act along the same lines of the worst criminals society has ever known. All the while smiling to your face.
Re:Libertarian fantasy wank. (Score:4, Insightful)
A strong state tends to amplify the influence of the wealthy, not mitigate it.
[reality check needed]
Let's take a case study:
US: A "weak" state in terms of taxes and regulation
Europe: Mostly "strong" states with more taxes and regulation
Where does wealth buy the most influence? The US. Sure, money talks in Europe too but not nearly as strongly. In fact, I would suggest that most of things that cause Americans to shout "Socialists!" are good for the masses, not the wealthy like universal health care, better unemployment/disability/retirement/whatever benefits, stronger consumer protection laws, stronger worker protection laws and so on. The wealthy could afford to buy it on their own and it'd probably be cheaper for them than the taxes they pay instead.
All of us have to deal with megacorporations even if we're not employed at them, many things have to be driven at a large industrial scale to be profitable today. They are the people that can and will screw you over because they're often a little oligarchy, sure they may push the customers around a little but in the end they can't leave the handful of companies that supply it. So you got burned by Intel and go AMD or burned by AMD and go Intel. And if you get burned by both? I suppose you might find a VIA board somewhere, but that's it.
They also supply many enough jobs that people will jump at them in a poor economy or even a not so poor one. The wealthy never have to deal with being a peon of an employee, the corporations run wild on behalf of their masters which are the wealthy ones we are talking about. You can pretend that "at will" is an equally strong tool in both directions but it's a lie, most companies can easily absorb losing an employee. Not so many employees can easily absorb losing their one and only job. Not to mention that in the US, your work is tied to your company health insurance.
The reason it seems like more laws means more laws written for the wealthy is because in the US the wealthy write the laws. Just FYI, that's not how it should work.
Re:Libertarian fantasy wank. (Score:4, Informative)
Have you actually ever visited a third world country?
I live in Brazil where sales tax is around 25% for food, for "luxury" items it could reach 70% of the final price. In order to dock at a Brazilian harbor, a ship has to fill over 140 different documents with a total of over 900 different questions.
In other words, you are absolutely correct. High taxes and over regulation are, basically, the cause of many countries being poor.
Taxes: not magic, but not obvious, either (Score:3, Interesting)
If that's how you figure it, you're not even close.
For instance, if you pay $100 for plumbing, but the plumber has to give $30 of that to the feds for his taxes, do you think the plumber is going to do $100 worth of work for you? No. He's only getting $70, and so that is the very MOST he going to do for you -- he'll do less, in fact, because otherwise he will not make a profit.
So, if you pay
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Sales taxes are demonstrably regressive; the poorest pay the highest percent of income because they necessarily *spend* the highest percent of their income.
Re:Taxes: not magic, but not obvious, either (Score:4, Insightful)
So, if you pay 30% taxes, then you had to earn $142.85 to pay the plumber $100, for which you got less than $70 worth of services. In the end, $142 of your dollars bought something less than $70 worth of services.
But by your logic, I only had to do $100 of work to earn the $142.85 (you say the plumber does $70 of work for the $100). So there's no double dipping.
Re:Libertarian fantasy wank. (Score:4, Interesting)
You obviously are more inclined to want more regulation until every facet of your life if regimented, say like China or North Korea.
No, there is no flaw in your slippery slope argument /sarcasm.
The only thing you fail to mention is that the "libertarian" examples you provided aren't libertarian at all. They are anarchistic. And if that is your view of LIBERTY than you shouldn't comment on ideals you have no concept of.
The function of government is to secure the liberties of the people. Most of the third world countries that are often touted by the leftwing anti liberty crowd (such as yourself), is that they DO NOT HAVE a functioning governance.
And while you're at it, why not admit that corporations are nothing more than collectives, like unions? When you realize that collectivization of politics leads to tyranny, then you'll be able to realize that you've been an idiot, and the end of your leftwing fantasy wank.
I'm not against "unions" or "corporations", I'm just against collectives of any sort infringing upon the liberties of anyone, even if I'm affected directly. Because even if I'm not personally affected by anti libertarian tyrants, I will be, eventually.
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Those are not bribe, those are just people with money getting to the front of the line; which according to libertarians is how it should be.
\
Yeah, by default, 3rd world countries become the end result of libertarian bullshit. The people with money get what ever they want, regardless of the harm to others, and people without become slaves and live in a hell hole. Naturally people with money want to stay being the people with money, so they do what ever they can to ensure they stay on top. As has been shown f
freedom (Score:5, Funny)
Electricity wants to be free!
Re:freedom (Score:5, Funny)
No, electricity wants to be *grounded*.
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Dear Anonymous Coward, That is why most stupid, crap-spewing dumbasses post as Anonymous Coward.
Dear Pseudononymous Coward,
I am glad to see you personally demonstrate that every rule has an exception.
British Power Supply (Score:4, Interesting)
Can someone explain how the mains circuit is supplied.
TFA was so light on details its very difficult to understand what he did. I'm not sure how you can actually illegally tap into the power grid without someone noticing. Here an inspector literally reads the meter or in some cases a digital meter supplies information automatically. In fact, my gas is apparently wireless and merely requires someone to drive by to meter the usage. It would seem like something that would be very difficult to subvert in a suburban environment.
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TFA was so light on details its very difficult to understand what he did. I'm not sure how you can actually illegally tap into the power grid without someone noticing.
We're reading about it, and the article wasn't written by the person, so obviously someone noticed (even though they were apparently slow about it... perhaps they wanted to let the charges rack up, so they could make an example of the person)
Re:British Power Supply (Score:4, Interesting)
Um, he can do all kinds of things.
Just tap into power and run it to a new building. Meter reader isn't expecting to go to the building to read the meter, so nothing is missed.
Or run electricity into building, through a box that looks like a meter, only gives out a faulty reading.
As for wireless and/or internet-connected meters, it wouldn't surprise me if the company isn't particularly on the clue train and may not, say, have a very good system in place for authenticating the data from the device [so you could replicate the signal and put out whatever reading you want]. However, the company probably does require a semi-regular physical meter reading, to check that the physical meter has the same reading as the broadcast one, and the system doesn't appear to be tampered with].
Electricity may be more complicated to wire up correctly to bypass the meter [so x% goes through the meter and y% goes around the meter], but gas and water are really straightforward to do the plumbing and to get a reasonable percentage through the meter, and people have been really imaginative in disguising/hiding the modifications.
Re:British Power Supply (Score:4, Interesting)
Or run electricity into building, through a box that looks like a meter, only gives out a faulty reading.
The article talks about buildings that are split into apartments. In the UK sometimes the landlord pays the electric company, and then has private meters for each apartment - all going through the main meter. (This is much less common than it was because there are strict limits on markup and additional charges. Most new flats now have electric company meters). The safest way to fiddle the bill would be to have one or two flats going through the main meter and the rest using an illegal collection. The landlord of course collects money from all the tenants!
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Where's here? Everywhere I've lived, it's possible to hook up to the grid illicitly. For example, when I lived in Canada, a lot of the pot grow houses were discovered by unusually high power consumption in an area. Clearly in N. America, it can be possible to get steal electricity too.
Re:British Power Supply (Score:5, Informative)
- The easy way: Vamp the cables before they go into the meter. Carefully poke needles into them, solder cable to the needles. Careful not to draw too much current, or they get hot - but British power is 230V, so a little current goes a long way. There is a risk of a meter reader noticing, but if you have a remotely-monitored smart-meter then this is an option. Popular with intensive pot-growers - not to avoid the fee, but because a house that suddenly spikes by several kilowatts and stays there will raise a suspicion notice at the utility, and may result in police going around to see if someone is operating hundreds of day-bulbs.
- The hard way: Find a cable someone else has paid for and splice in. Good targets are outbuildings. If your garage is next to theirs, a little breaking-and-entering is all you need.
- The insane way: Tap into the actual mains distribution cables under the roads or on utility poles. I think this is what he was doing. High effort, high risk of detection, high risk of electrocution. Only a real electrician could do this, like the person of the article. Allows access to great amounts of power, for running large buildings.
Re:British Power Supply (Score:4, Informative)
Fourth way, if you live near high voltage cables run cables beneath to tap of electricity by induction. People have been prosecuted in the UK for doing this.
The electric company meters the supply upstream of the domestic supplies so they have an idea if someone is drawing electricity illegally as all the individual readings should add up to the global reading minus losses.
Re:British Power Supply (Score:4, Interesting)
How in the world do you prosecute someone for using an induction loop?
I mean, sure, you could prosecute them for trespass or something if you move your stuff onto their property/airspace, but if it's all on your own land, it's just EM waves flowing through the air. If the land owner has to put up with the radiation they didn't ask for, who is to say that they can't use it to induce a current?
Anyhow, I figure you might be trollin' seeing as how you'd have to get really close to get any measurable power via induction, but it is an interesting question in any case...
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definitely measurable...
http://www.doobybrain.com/2008/02/03/electromagnetic-fields-cause-fluorescent-bulbs-to-glow/ [doobybrain.com]
Re:British Power Supply (Score:5, Informative)
It is theft of power. If it wasn't able to be prosecuted, you'd have people buying up tracts of land under high tension power lines and erecting commercial or industrial scale induction loops. The government/courts would then say to themselves - we either side with modern civilization as we know it, or a pack of free-loading bullshit artists. Hmmm, tough choice.
Re:British Power Supply (Score:4, Informative)
It is theft of power. If it wasn't able to be prosecuted, you'd have people buying up tracts of land under high tension power lines and erecting commercial or industrial scale induction loops. The government/courts would then say to themselves - we either side with modern civilization as we know it, or a pack of free-loading bullshit artists. Hmmm, tough choice.
You've been modded funny, but there are actually a few examples where bullshit artists have taken the system to court and lost precisely because if they were to win, the resulting mess would be far more than any sane government would want to contemplate. IANAL, but AFAICT most judges take a fairly dim view of people trying to twist an interpretation of the law in a fashion that would be of great detriment to society.
Re:British Power Supply (Score:5, Interesting)
You can even see this in judgements we would now disagree with.
The famous "end of slavery" judgement in England is very narrowly written, it holds that slavery is a repugnant institution, and so could only exist in England if it was the law, then it says the law doesn't provide for slavery in England, and so the plaintiff, who is in England, is not a slave and may go free.
But it carefully says nothing about slavery outside England. There were in practice essentially no slaves in England, which is why this chap (brought there from a colony and unwilling to return) was chosen as a test case. Everything was paid for by anti-slavery advocates. So the intention was to secure a judgement that slavery as a whole was illegal, and the judge did not do that. He didn't want to cause chaos by spontaneously freeing huge numbers of slaves.
Campaigners still called this an end to slavery, but England continued to operate slave ships, and to control colonies whose commercial viability depended on slavery. The only thing that had changed was a man who found himself in England could be sure he wasn't a slave - though as a servant he might be little better off. It would take many more years before English rulers instructed their colonies to cease buying new slaves and grant their existing slaves freedom.
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Conversely, the power company ought to control their emissions. If they're leaking enough power onto a person's property to be usefully collected, they should compensate the property owner for the EM pollution.
Re:British Power Supply (Score:4, Informative)
Remember that induction reciprocates. If you have a transformer without a secondary winding, or with a mild bulk resistor in the EM field -- like happens around high voltage AC transmission lines, then the transformer runs at some nominal loss that you can't do much about. As soon as you add a secondary winding and load it, the primary winding current increases! So the "leakage" by itself doesn't mean that they are losing as much power as they would if you had an actual secondary winding there, with a load. Ground, even wet ground, and buildings, even with metal in them, are very poor transformer secondaries. Something purpose-designed -- doesn't have to be.
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Re:British Power Supply (Score:4, Informative)
How in the world do you prosecute someone for using an induction loop?
I mean, sure, you could prosecute them for trespass or something if you move your stuff onto their property/airspace, but if it's all on your own land, it's just EM waves flowing through the air. If the land owner has to put up with the radiation they didn't ask for, who is to say that they can't use it to induce a current?
Anyhow, I figure you might be trollin' seeing as how you'd have to get really close to get any measurable power via induction, but it is an interesting question in any case...
Those are good questions. Firstly, when you draw power using induction you are actually creating a load on the power supply. It's more-or-less the same as if you had spliced into the cable, but easier to hide and less likely to kill you. Secondly, building and using a coil for this purpose is a very deliberate theft of service with physical evidence (a coil, and usually a cable running to the thief's house). So yes, you can definately prosecute for this, even if there was no tresspassing.
As for distance, if you have a sufficiently large coil on the ground under powerlines then that is close enough to draw power.
This is actually a very common method to defraud electricity providers, particularly in informal settlements (squatter camps) where coils are easy to conceal.
Re:All you say are lies. (Score:4, Informative)
I think it's partially BS. An induction loop that provides useful power (enough to run a house) at a distance of 100 yards to the AC transmission line must be coupling to a big-scale high voltage line -- I'd presume something above 100kV. AFAIK, in those lines, change in losses due to changes in something as trivial as air humidity beats whatever consumption a house would have, by orders of magnitude. I doubt they would be able to measure whatever this man did. Now it's true that he did increase the load on their line, but the instantaneous power transmitted by such lines is such that one house's worth of load is below the capability of typical industrial measurement systems. So it's true that he was stealing power, but I doubt they came to him due to "extra load in their circuit". Besides, such lines are costly to maintain, so I presume it's rare that you would run such a line without normal loads attached to it. I'd think that leakage measurements with disconnected loads are rare: idling a big transmission line wastes lots of money.
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How in the world do you prosecute someone for using an induction loop?
What do you mean "how"? "How can you succesfully prosecute a case like that": As any other case, collect evidence that there was an intent to do something naughty and take it from there; shouldn't be too hard - big inductors and appliances using the power generated is all that is needed. If you mean "Why is this even reasonable?", then consider that energy is never destroyed or created. To demonstrate the effect of tapping energy by induction, try to measure the power consumption on the input side of a tran
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Fourth way, if you live near high voltage cables run cables beneath to tap of electricity by induction. People have been prosecuted in the UK for doing this.
Citation needed. I am sure that the loss would be insignificant compared to the total power in HV transmission lines.
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if you live near high voltage cables run cables beneath to tap of electricity by induction
BUSTED: Mythbusters did it [mythbustersresults.com].
You don't get nearly enough power.
video here [howstuffworks.com]
Re:British Power Supply (Score:4, Insightful)
No they did not (Score:4, Informative)
They showed the coils of bailing wire didn't work with specific PG&E transmission lines to 'power a house'.
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Missing option: the inductive way. Requires land under high tension power lines. AFAIK, there is still a good chance that you will get caught.
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The other side of that coin is that a pot grower in Australia with a lot of plants very well hidden in several large fibreglass water tanks was caught only because the meter reader noticed several cables going from the back of the meter box to the tanks.
Re:British Power Supply (Score:5, Funny)
No, the truly insane way to steal power would be to nick a nuclear power plant and install it in your garden shed.
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Meter readers only read the meters they know about. There is nothing to stop me climbing up the power pole outside my house and clamping my own cables on to the mains supply. I would need to know what I was doing (this guy did, and I probably do to a smaller degree) and I would have to live with the possibility of death by electrocution. Somebody might notice the connection one day, most likely a repair crew working on a different job. It would be hard to hide because they would just follow the cable.
But sa
genius! (Score:3, Funny)
Wait, so let me get this straight: You design an electric vehicle with special arms whose sole purpose is to reach up its arms at night to recharge, then sit there during the day as the bat
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No, during the day you drive it around. Then stop where you can steal power during the night.
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cleverly designed arms
Pantographs.
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cleverly designed arms
Pantographs.
Yeah thats the word but now I am thinking in terms of jumper cables with hooks on the end and a snare built out of 40mm pipe with a cable running along the inside. If you can bang in your own ground you might just need to snare the active. Design it for a fast charge. Could be the breakthrough that electric vehicles have been waiting for!
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Here in the UK mains cables run mostly underground. Assuming you are familiar with live working on underground cables it would be pretty easy to add an unauthorised branch and it would be almost impossible for them to find it.
Metering guys are only going to notice theft if you are retarded enough to do it at the metering position in a property that officially has electricity.
About his prosecution (Score:3, Funny)
So I guess the charges he was brought up on were negative, am I right?
Re:About his prosecution (Score:5, Funny)
I see you have posted AC...not DC.
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The RIAA would have been more Direct. Charged him with each "making available" a potential of 50 times the country's possible generation capacity.
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It doesn't really matter, the news is still current.
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Nah nah na nah na... Thunder.
Bad puns aside... (Score:3, Interesting)
If people were willing to use this scheme to get cheaper electricity, I guess the electricity is too expensive.
Here in Denmark over 90% of the amount we pay for electricity is various taxes. No wonder people turn to alternative solutions because once you've done yours and switched bulbs, appliances and everything to the most environmentally friendly versions available, you still get a hefty bill and there's nothing (more) you can do about it - except perhaps to steal the electricity that is... ;)
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... you still get a hefty bill and there's nothing (more) you can do about it - except perhaps to steal the electricity that is... ;)
Produce it? (PV, methane [loganenergy.com]fuell-cell [cfcl.com.au]... even riding your exercise bike while your spouse irons the cloths? ;) )
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... you still get a hefty bill and there's nothing (more) you can do about it - except perhaps to steal the electricity that is... ;)
Produce it? (PV,
Not in the UK!
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I believe it was the landlord doing this, not the tenants who probably paid the landlord for utilities. And people will always want free stuff.
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Just out of curiosity, how much do you pay over there?
For comparison: I'm in a major city in Texas. On my last electric bill, I was billed for about 589 kWh of electricity, and paid $78.28, including taxes and all fees. That number includes a $17.10 installation fee (first month), so if I use roughly the same amount of electricity on the next bill, it might be a little over $60.
Of the total, $2.07 is listed as "sales tax." That would be somewhere just over 2% of the total amount. Now, maybe there are other
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Though considering most of that comes from coal/etc., it might as well be that the price doesn't quite cover all the costs...
(surely the differences in vehicle fuel prices are quite close to what you ask about)
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Last winter I was averaging £100 ($150 approx) a month on electricity and the same again on gas.
That is in a 3 storey, 3 bedroom modern town-house in London. The rent is £400 a month
with a housing association. The rent would be at least double or probably triple that
if it was with a private landlord. To buy a similar property in my current area I would
need to find somewhere in the region of £400,000.
Property prices in London are mental.
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A number of people have replied giving their typical electricity bill.
The problem with this is that you can't compare on the basis of what a person's electricity bill is, because there are all sorts of lifestyle factors that impact the bill but aren't included when you hear "I pay £N/month". For instance, if you're in Texas, I'll assume you probably have air conditioning in your house and it frequently runs during the summer months? Not really necessary in the UK, since it seldom goes above 30 Celsi
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Here in .au my last bill was $114.90 for 384 kWh. AUD is roughly equivalent to USD at the moment: 113.21 USD.
That includes 10% GST ($10.44), a 75c fee for credit card payment of my last bill, and $21.27 for 'Natural Power Premium' where they allegedly source equivalent of my energy usage from renewable resources, and a $9.73 'supply charge' which I assume is a fixed price for being connected to the grid. That leaves $72.70 as being for the energy usage itself.
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Considering what "pleasure" it is to deal with some London landlords, and the perpetrator here might well be one of them, it's not too improbable that many people actually didn't know they were stealing.
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. Ofgem, the electricity and gas market regulators, support that claim in their 2008 report [ofgem.gov.uk] (pdf). There's also an 8% environmental levy which some would lump in with tax. It's interesting to note that the UK has the 3rd hig
Harry Tuttle? (Score:3, Interesting)
Tuttle, or was it Buttle? Anyhow, clearly a rogue handyman on the loose. Better arrest somebody.
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Can this wait for a while? Or maybe you should check if he wasn't dormanted already?
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150 Hours of Community Service (Score:5, Funny)
Buttle, anyone? (Score:2, Offtopic)
Don't know why, but I don't find surprising at all the guy is from the same country as the The Pythons.
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Do you think is ironic, rather?
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Michael Palin was in that one as well.
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import electricity
#????
print 'profit'
Power should be free anyway (Score:2)
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No point having free power if you can't afford a home so everybody should have a free house too.
(apologies to R.A.H who covered this at the end of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress).
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I almost remember how the central heating was used when there was just one metering device for each stairway (which would one for 30 apartments where I am). People... just don't possess the sense of moderation in such background utilities (which of course ended either with over-engineered heating plant, or every radiator being at most lukewarm)
And I don't know about Michigan / I won't read the link obviously - but where I live there are also places to keep oneself warm; and vast majority of freezing deaths
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Either that or their class wasn't taught by a rabid Randroid.
Re:Power should be free anyway (Score:5, Insightful)
Roads/Schools/Libraries are classified as public goods, which the free market does not allocate very efficiently. That's why we use taxes to pay for them and provide them for everyone. I think the parent understands that they aren't "free" in the sense that you mean.
Go take an introductory macroeconomics class and then get back to us when you're slightly more educated. We really don't have the time or patience to deal with you until then.
No Pirate, a Thief (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:No Pirate, a Thief (Score:4, Insightful)
Does that minus sign next to the story title do anything? I'm going to press it anyway.
More power to him! (Score:2, Offtopic)
Not stolen, just borrored! (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
The electrons were kidnapped, imprisoned and for all we know used for immoral purposes by being forced to download 4chan. Thats no way to treat a bunch of 14 billion year old atomic particles. The UN should so something about this. Please, won't anybody think about the fermions?
Article short on faces (Score:2)
The article doesn't give any useful information about what was actually going on and doesn't mention dodgy landlord Haresh Parmar cited in the summary.
In 22 of HIS appartments... (Score:2)
New Labour (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
"The victim then has to prove that they came by the assets legally in order to get them back"
Well, yeah! Guilty until proven innocent is clearly the most intelligent way to go about things.
See ? Another good use of DRM! (Score:3, Insightful)
.. They wouldn't have stolen it that fast when it had DRM!
(I can't believe I've said pro-DRM crap; my low-uid must be tarnished for life now!)
Re: (Score:2)
I submitted the article; (Score:2)
I got the details about the landlord being prosecuted from here: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:4m7ouHfb-GwJ:findarticles.com/p/news-articles/people-the-london-uk/mi_8046/is_20100919/revolting-behaviour/ai_n55280555/+derek+brown+Haresh+Parmar&cd=6&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk [googleusercontent.com]
I figured that a Google cache link wasn't quite worthy of being linked in the submission so I just included some details from that article.
There is nothing online with much detail about how exactly the conn
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
He was merely following Joule's first law [wikipedia.org]. It can't be illegal to follow the law.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)